Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ by Eleana Kim (review)

Reminders of the Korean peninsula's division have not always been visible or obvious, but they are ubiquitous in the everyday lives of South Koreans. Morning and evening news programs frequently present stories about North Korea's latest missile launches or nuclear experiments, expressing grave concern that the North may attack South Korea and defeat the US military stationed there. Tenacious investigations of those suspected of having pro-North Korean sentiments can be seen as an ongoing political project, regardless of the government's stated political orientation, to consolidate South Korean anti-communist nationalism. Tragic stories about families separated by the Korean War are circulated in the form of documentaries, TV shows, and emotional video clips of government-arranged family reunions. All of these "division reminders" have directed the teleological desire for ethnonational unification "someday" in South Korea. Yet, as the ambiguous temporality of division, which is temporary but permanent, and hopeful but unpredictable, has diversified the vision of a national future among young South Koreans, the necessity of ethnonational unification has been gradually replaced with a new political rhetoric of "peace"—a more universal aspiration beyond national constraints.

Of the divided landscape, there is no better marker than the DMZ (demilitarized zone) that materializes and visualizes the ongoing inter-Korean conflict and the temporary peace (or ceasefire) that resulted from the Korean War. The DMZ has played a key role in buffering possible military confrontations (demilitarization) as well as restricting human encroachment with the threat of indiscriminately buried landmines (militarization). Eleana Kim's new book on the highly "de/militarized" zone, as the Epilogue title aptly puts it, Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ is a breakthrough ethnography that thoroughly investigates how the untouchable and untouched border zone, has become an exceptional "nature" space that generates new knowledge production about inter-species interactions and opens up new possibilities to envision peace with nature.

Kim's book stages the DMZ's exceptionality through the intersection of militarism and capitalist desire. As vividly presented in Chapter 4, the South Korean government in the 1960s encouraged poor Koreans to move near the DMZ, which normally had very limited civilian access. The purpose was for them to farm rice there to showcase the prosperity of South Korean border towns. The DMZ is not only remote from any metropolitan area, but there is the danger of randomly buried deadly weapons—landmines. The new tenants cleared the mines to reclaim land for cultivation. They also searched for scrap metal and military waste to supplement their small income from farming. Sometimes, their search resulted in sudden injury or death when they stepped on a landmine. But until their right to compensation was legislated in 2014, the victims remained silent and did not request any official help. This reticence was because of the agreement they signed with the government when they moved to the border towns (p. 127). Kim conceptualizes landmines as "rogue infrastructure" in that they, as entanglements between nature, culture, and technology (p. 121), possess unpredictable lifespans, unintentional affordance, and spatiotemporal contingency. In contrast to the rules set forth by the Mine Ban Treaty of 1997, the aberrant actant landmines have been allowed to remain in the DMZ as essential deterrents as well as toxic weapons the US military buried for the sake of Korean exceptionalism. Kim's ethnography shows that the landmine victims believed themselves to be war victims who not only endured fear of state oppression and random death, but also patriots who contributed to national construction by confronting the enemy on the other side of the border.

The seemingly long untouched and silent DMZ began to attract particular global attention when the inter-Korea relationship deteriorated, and the South Korean government took a critical neoliberal turn under the successive administrations of Lee Myung Bak and Park Guen Hye. At this time, the South Korean government sought to reorient the DMZ from a war-made conflict...